With Ballgames This Exciting, It's No Wonder Everybody's Yawning

By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

Published: October 20, 2004

After nearly 12 hours of grinding Yankees-Red Sox baseball -- two games, totaling 26 innings, that both ended on Monday -- New York City yesterday was a weary, frazzled town that rued its reputation for never sleeping.

''Coming in on the train this morning,'' said John O'Malley, 48, a salesman at Saks Fifth Avenue, ''I am ... like ... I ... cannot... ... watch another baseball game. You know you're going to watch, but you are just so wiped out from baseball.''

On the other hand, Peter Archey, 38, marketing director at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a large law firm, is delighted to be exhausted: ''I got four hours of sleep, and the hours of sleep I lost I was happy to lose. I'm a Red Sox fan, and I've lived amidst the Evil Empire for 15 long years.''

While Yankee fans woke up gritting their teeth and Red Sox fans woke up with a smile (and baseball agnostics wondered what the big deal was), everyone could agree that the city's job productivity yesterday, and perhaps for the rest of the week, would be called into question. That was almost guaranteed after last night's victory by the Red Sox, which actually came early this morning and stretched the series to a seventh game.

Jack Connolly, a clinical psychologist and expert on sleep and performance, said some research showed that as little as 20 minutes of lost sleep over only two days can hurt performance the next morning. ''In modern life, stress hormones are released at work and, of course, while watching a ballgame,'' said Mr. Connolly, whose Shiftwork Consultants in Port Washington, N.Y., advises around-the-clock businesses. ''It's like an air-traffic controller who has a very stressful job working 4 o'clock to midnight,'' Mr. Connolly said. ''It takes you two or three hours to wind down and fall asleep.''

The culprit, he said, is a stress hormone called cortisol that heightens alertness, much like caffeine.

''The people in Boston and New York, and St. Louis and Houston, and anywhere people are fans, they're going to be tired, irritable; they're not going to perform as well,'' Mr. Connolly said.

But the Red Sox-Yankees duel uniquely takes on the cast of Achilles versus Hector. Frederic Frommer, co-author of ''Red Sox vs. Yankees: The Great Rivalry,'' said few rivalries had stretched into a century of enmity. ''This is the way to think about it,'' Mr. Frommer said. ''There's a fable about Red Sox fans going to heaven and asking God, 'When will my team win the World Series again?' God scratches his chin and says, finally, 'Well, not in my lifetime.'''

But of the two camps, Yankee fans are the ones who feel blindsided this week and may be dragging just a bit more than Red Sox fans.

John J. Findeisen, 33, an information technology director for Instinet Group, a Manhattan brokerage firm, speaks for a lot of Yankee fans. ''I thought they were going to sweep in four games,'' he said, ''but now they got me a little nervous giving up these last two games.'' He remembers crawling into bed at home on the Upper West Side around 12:30 a.m. Monday for Game 4.

''I'd doze in and doze out,'' he said, ''but every time the Red Sox would do something, then the TV volume would jump, and I'd wake up.''

Monday morning, Mr. Findeisen said, was bad: ''I was dragging big time, big time. I needed the double espresso at Starbucks just to walk and keep myself going. But all of a sudden I realized Game 5 was starting at 5 o' clock and I got to get everything done at work so I can get out of here.''

His plan was then to go to Harrison's Tavern, his favorite sports bar on the Upper West Side, which is known as a Red Sox bar. He would get some beers, watch the game and ''I'd be home by 9 and in bed and catch up on my sleep.''

Mr. Findeisen said he established some personal records Monday night -- 14 beers for 14 innings. ''I kept on drinking beers, and the game kept going, and the next thing I know it's 11.''

Yesterday, on a chilly, drizzly evening, the early regulars at Time Out New York, the Yankee bar only three doors down from Harrison's, the talk about sleep was more blas?

Todd Lynch, 27, an unemployed software engineer, said he went to sleep at 1:45 a.m. after Game 4 and got up after noon. But lest his Yankee devotion be held suspect, he noted that on a trip to London last week he got up at 2 a.m. to watch Games 1 and 2. Mr. Lynch nodded, as if to say, ''Now that's a fan.''

As for Mr. Findeisen, the employed information technology director, he had some advice for groggy Yankee fans who want to keep their jobs. ''Set two alarm clocks for the morning,'' he said.